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Desktop team fonts whiteboard

We spend most of our computer time reading and writing text. Studies show that even the smallest improvement in fonts or font rendering produces huge benefits. The competition has realised it a long time ago.

Make font installation easy. Packages may not be the best approach to fonts (packaging means minimal legal audit of the font, addition of human-friendly description and necessary fontconfig rules, bundling of license text, fc-cache automation, etc Doing it all elsewhere means creating another font-specific packaging format.)

Font creation

The best way to try one's hand at font creation, and learn the (technical and organisational) ropes, is to contribute some time to a free/open font project, such as the ones listed on this page.

Most free/open font projects fail not because of author lack of artistic taste, but because they do not attract contributors or distributors. Free/open font dynamics are very different from proprietary font dynamics, and usually not taught in art school.

To start working on fonts just install the font-design group (available in Fedora 11 and later).

# yum groupinstall font-design

Font hinting

Good font hinting is required for fonts to render well on computer screens with limited pixel density. Many fonts only sport limited hinting. The fine DejaVu authors published a [tutorial] to guide people wishing to remedy this.